


What Doesn't Split Evenly

by megdanger



Category: Prospect (2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cee is a tough cookie, Character studies, Don't mind me I'm just tossing my "the ending was good and all but what if MORE?" onto the pile, Gen, Post-Canon, a little bit of that angst, a little bit of that fluff, and Ezra is a walking disaster who never shuts up, and you know we soft for that found family shit, you have exchanged your crappy space-dad for a different kind of crappy space-dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29014689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megdanger/pseuds/megdanger
Summary: Cee and Ezra have safely escaped the Green and rejoined the line. But safe is only the first step and neither of them wants to think about what comes next.aka what's worse: condemning yourself to being alone in an uncaring universe or Having To Talk About Your Space-Feelings?
Comments: 30
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cee remembers her father, adjusts to the reality of their escape, and tries to wrap her head around the idea of the future, with mixed results. Ezra is less than helpful.

When Cee sees her father crash to the ground in the Green, thrown backward by the impact of the shot from the thrower, there’s a disconnected part of her that thinks, _this is the last memory I’ll ever have of him._ Later, when she’s huddled in their broken-down wreck of a pod, chewing Damon’s psychotropic pills that make her head spin and stomach turn but are better than having to face the reality that she’s trapped alone on the Green Moon, the thought still rises again, unbidden, through the tinny music blaring out from her headphones.

 _Whenever I think of my father, that will be what I remember._

Triggers pulled in movements too fast to follow, the muffled thud of bodies against the grassy ground. One moment there, one moment gone. Except. 

Except that strangely, whatever the reason, every time after that first time, once the drugs had worn off, whenever Cee’s thoughts drift back to her father, whether in guilt that she hadn’t acted fast enough to save him, or in anger (anger was a big one) for him bringing them out to this toxic moon in the first place, where the people that roamed it and the very air around them jockeyed for position as to what was more likely to kill them first, anger for not just leaving when she’d asked, anger towards Ezra for his role in her father’s death, whatever the emotion, this didn’t seem to be true. 

The memory of his quick-draw stand-off death in that small clearing is not what plays in Cee’s head when she thinks of him in these moments. Instead, she recalls Damon sprawled on the cot of the junky, rented pod, the cycle before they were scheduled for touchdown, just after he’d taken the drops to help him sleep. He’d been teetering in the tipsy space between wake and nodding off and had told her in a fit of giggles that she looked just like her mother, and that she’d been born on Lao, while he and her mom were on holiday, but that she still wasn’t from anywhere, not really. Couldn’t be from Kamrea because she couldn’t even say it right. And then just like that, he’d slipped away into sleep before Cee could learn anything else. That’s how it had always been when it came to talking about her mother. Fits and bursts when it suited Damon, and usually when he was on something.

But this is what she remembers when they make the slingback, when the mercenaries’ stripped-down rockhopper finally makes shuddering contact as it docks with the freighter, the ship’s manual that had been first hanging off the central navigation board, then clutched tight in one shaking hand as she frantically flipped switches and checked dials and gauges with the other, now sitting in her lap.

As the spiky adrenaline slowly, far too slowly, settles itself in her veins and she allows the reality to sink in that yes, she did it, she _made it_ , somehow, she’d survived the Green, she sees Damon, her father, not pointing a gun at another man as desperate as he is, lips curled in a sneer as he waves a case full of aurelac even as Cee begs him to go, just before his life ends, but instead lying half-asleep, chuckling softly, never quite telling her the whole story but, at that moment at least, happy.

He would be happy to know that she’d made it off the Green Moon alive, wouldn’t he? 

Even if she’d done it with the man who’d taken his life?

Cee turns to the pilot’s chair, currently occupied by said man. By _Ezra_. Cee is certain she has yet to actually say his name out loud or refer to him as anything but “Hey.” She can’t pin down what exactly feels wrong about calling the man by his name, even after everything they’ve just been through. She had amputated his arm with cool precision, mostly as the situation required her to, and somehow, perhaps as a result of the prospector’s own loquaciousness, found herself opening up to him about _The Streamer Girl_ and other things she had hesitated to share with even her father. But actually calling him Ezra had still felt a shade too far.

Cee shrugs mentally, filing the feeling away to be examined more thoroughly later. Most of her emotional responses and deliberations are kept entirely interior, and always have been. Partly out of a sense of her own safety, partly because there’s never been anyone else to share them with anyway.

“Judging by the tenor of your expression, Birdie, you don’t seem as pleased with our miraculous flight to freedom as one would expect,” Ezra wheezes as he elbows his way into her thoughts. 

He had been largely insensible during the launch, head lolling to the side as he slumped in the pilot’s chair, held in place only by the straps of the seat belt. Her heart pounding, as if she wasn’t already stressed enough, scared enough, because _of course she wasn’t_ , during the initial docking procedure, in-between punching command codes and chattering at-speed with the main freighter hub, she had dug around what remained of the stripped-down ship for a field kit, determined that Ezra wouldn’t bleed out on her, not after coming this far, not after she’d gone back for him.

There wasn’t time to think too hard about why.

After another round of applying antiseptic, of patching up wounds, and administering painkillers, Cee has the thought that she was starting to get rather good at this, could maybe have a future as some kind of med tech. She scoffs as soon as she thinks it. Sure, all she has to do is go to a school she couldn’t afford, or alternatively, find work with a crew that wouldn’t object to hiring on a teenager with precious little field experience. Both options are equally as likely as the other.

Ezra, meanwhile, seemed to have returned to the world of the waking and was well enough at least to be using the nickname he’d foisted on her and continues to make use of even after she’d told him her name. Cee briefly wonders if Ezra feels just as uncomfortable at the idea of saying her name as she does his, but she doesn’t think so. He’s definitely called her Cee before, and there seems to be a level of enjoyment in the small annoyance “little bird” causes her. Ezra, she has quickly learned in their time together, is a man held together by desperate grit, entirely too many words, and a pile of odd, often conflicting quirks.

After he pauses to cough, hand pressed protectively against the still very fresh wound on his abdomen, the older man continues on, “or is it just that your thoughts are weighing more heavily,” another pause as he grimaces, shifting position in the chair, in what Cee not unsympathetically figures is probably a futile attempt to try to get more comfortable, “in the direction of the future?”

That hadn’t been where they were at all, at least until that last moment, but still, he isn’t wrong. Cee knows she can’t afford to get too wrapped up in the feeling of victory, in the feeling of safety. As soon as the freighter takes them to the Central Satellite Hub, it’ll be time to face the reality of What Comes Next. But for the moment, she can defer.

“What about you?” she asks, “I was able to get through to the main freighter hub on the comms, they said they’ll have a medic standing by once we land but you’ll need to get to a hospital.”

Ezra laughs and it sounds somewhere between a low growl and something half-hysterical, “No shit. What’s your point? Do I detect worry on behalf of my humble personage? I’ve got the points for it. Might even be able to swing a prosthetic,” he pauses, head tilted like he’s trying to remember something before adding, “maybe…Either way, I wasn’t asking you to worry about me. You did your part.”

He stops again but this time it’s not to accommodate his injury. Ezra’s eyes, bright and dark at the same time, calculating and yet kind when they wanted to be, slide from Cee and down to his boots. 

“Far more than your part, little bird,” he says, his voice a quiet rasp against the hum of the ship.

Cee squirms uncomfortably at this statement. These were the feelings that were meant to be put away for later when the focus wasn’t on survival. Except, conveniently, now that she was an orphan, the focus would _always_ be on survival. And whose fault was that? This man, this one right here in front of her. This sorrowful-looking individual with one arm who talked too much and didn’t think it was weird that she lived in other people’s stories because her own was so often too painful. Who had been ready to die so that she could escape.

“My name is Cee,” is what she grumbles in answer because she doesn’t know what else to say.

And Ezra laughs again but this time it’s followed by a rough wince, sweat standing out against his skin.

“You can’t be doin’ that to me, Cee. It’s rather imperative that I hold myself together at least a little longer. So what about you, you got kinfolk out there you can head back to? If you need points to get back to them, I can - ”

Cee stiffens. Doesn’t want to think about how she’ll be alone again just yet but there it is. There are points left in her father’s account, she knows, but it won’t get her very far for very long. Still, what’s the other option? Accept Ezra’s charity? A “Sorry I Killed Your Daddy” fund? A means for them to part ways with the prospector able to perhaps feel a little less guilty about the poor little orphan girl he was leaving behind if it meant he couldn’t afford a new arm? She feels nauseous and stands up. 

“Yeah,” she says too quickly, “I’ve got an uncle. He’s not too far. There’s enough points in my father’s account. It’s fine.” 

And she darts out of the cockpit towards the tiny crew’s quarters, leaving Ezra alone to pick apart the last moments of the conversation with a head still fuzzy from blood loss and Dust inhalation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Gee Meg, you started writing fanfic after 10+ years bc of a charming, idiot disaster criminal who talked too much, had decent intentions, deep down, and had a bad habit of throwing themselves in harm's way. What's got you writing fic again now? ...Ah, I see, a charming, idiot disaster criminal who talks too much and has decent intentions, deep down, with a bad habit of throwing themselves in harm's way. Well, at least we're consistent."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ezra thinks. A lot. Just an absurd amount. And yet still manages to get it wrong.

Over the course of their admittedly tense partnership, Ezra has come to appreciate that he and Cee share several traits that he has found to be very useful both in the Green and life in general. One is an elevated sense of self-preservation. Or, at least that’s something he’d _thought_ he had, but that’s a thought he can always return to and mull over later, provided he lives that long, which is a thing he’s become used to being in flux but seems even less of a certainty these days. Cee has the grit necessary to keep herself alive, which is, by all accounts, fairly incredible, especially considering her father. 

He’s only known Cee for a short time, and he’d known Damon for a far shorter one, but Ezra feels like he can state with full confidence that Cee has grit, whereas Damon, even when he was alive, did not. How this managed to occur is beyond his knowledge, and really, his caring, if he’s being perfectly honest with himself (which he likes to think he is, generally).

He hadn’t felt much in the way of remorse when he’d fired the final shot that had ended Damon’s life. Ezra is not one for self-reflecting but is aware that he is not what most folks would consider a “good person.” Which is fine. Being a good person didn’t get you far in the Green. But by whatever moral standard he has left after his time prospecting aurelac, Ezra cannot wrap his mind around a parent bringing their child to a place like the Green, to deal with mercenaries, no less. He had barely been able to believe his eyes when he’d seen Cee standing there, gun aimed at his chest, terrified though she was. 

_She_ had grit. As far as Ezra was concerned, Damon, traipsing through that toxic nightmare like the kip he was, his only progeny in tow, had fuck all. (He hasn’t asked Cee for the finer details but he doubts it would shift his opinion much).

Another thing they shared was practicality. Cee didn’t waste time over what could’ve or should’ve been, a pod that did or didn’t work. She was focused on what was in front of them and needed to be accomplished, even if it was something horrible, something distasteful, something frightening. Traversing a deadly moon with the one working filter between them as cycles ran out, amputating an arm with a blade no longer than her thumb, bargaining with a gang of professional murderers who were only half in their right minds.

Making a deal for survival with the man who’d killed her father. 

That was how a body got by in the Green. You did what had to be done and you didn’t waste time wavering around on impractical matters. 

Cee’s writing and her fantasies about her favorite book characters weren’t, as her father seemed to believe, a mark of impracticality, but just the opposite. When presented with the hard, often joyless life of a Floater out in the Fringe, the little bird had sought solace wherever she could, flying deep into stories so unlike her own, nesting down in their fictional lives and drawing strength from them. When Ezra tells her that he doesn’t think she’s strange for it, that he’s downright impressed, he’s completely genuine, which is a rare thing. But Cee seems to have that effect on him. Ezra isn’t sure why, and with the majority of his faculties focused on keeping his body running, now is perhaps not the best time for trying to get to the bottom of that particular mystery.

But to that point, nonetheless, the final trait Ezra has noticed in their travels is that they each hide the truth of themselves far too well. But they did so in vastly different ways. Ezra did by being big and loud and with a broad and stupid grin on his face the whole time. If you never stopped talking then people never had the chance to figure out the truth of you. If you made people think you were a wide-open book, then they wouldn’t go searching too far for what they thought was sitting right in front of them. 

Cee was the opposite. She was closed off, folded down into herself tiny and tight like intricate origami. When she spoke, when she acted, when she performed tasks that would make a grown man blanch, her face revealed almost nothing. Like her writing, Ezra finds it as impressive as it is heart-breaking because he can only guess what Cee must have been through to have to develop that kind of mask, to hone and refine it and ensure that it would not break, even in the face of her father’s death. 

It’s this last trait that he thinks of as he sits in the pilot’s chair, his chest throbbing even with the addition of the painkillers, not to mention the feeling he can’t shake that his right hand - which no longer exists - is curled in a tight fist.

_“Yeah, I’ve got an uncle. He’s not too far. There’s enough points in my father’s account. It’s fine.”_

_Shit._

_Shit shit shit shit._

She’d said it with an almost perfect, measured carelessness but it only takes a few moments of fogged-over thinking from Ezra’s already exhausted brain to hit on the obvious: If that girl had any other family to her name then why the fuck would that father of hers be dragging her through the perils of the Green?

Whatever the circumstances, whatever Damon had done to make things what they were, Ezra had killed the only family she’d had left in the whole damn universe. And Cee’d lied about it just now to avoid the awkwardness of that realization. To avoid having to see whatever shame and discomfort that’s playing out over Ezra’s face right now. 

He’d give her his points. Surely, that was the least he could do. No prosthetic arm but fine, whatever, without her he’d be dead anyway, what was an arm? An arm for a life, for the better part of a lifetime spent doing much the same things to much the same people. It had just caught up with him now was all. Caught up with him in the form of a kid who reminded Ezra too much of himself but better. Someone who came back for people like him who didn’t deserve it. 

He hoists himself out of the pilot’s chair, breath catching in his throat as he does, vision blurring for a moment and he has to close his eyes, steady himself with the one arm available to him. His right shoulder burns and his chest burns and he tries to shake it off as best as he can and make his way to the cramped crew’s quarters where Cee has wedged herself in a corner, scribbling furiously in a notebook. He knows she must’ve heard him coming, he’s not exactly the model of stealth, staggering across the worn metal flooring, but she makes a point of not looking up all the same.

With monumental effort, Ezra manages to dump his tired body onto a cot, unknowingly landing himself in much the same position as Cee’s father in the memory that keeps resurfacing in her mind. He breathes hard, limbs shaking as he fights for control, hand pressed down against his abdomen again, as though he can shield it from danger. He turns to Cee, who is still very pointedly looking at her notebook.

“So this uncle of yours, Uncle - well, firstly, what’s his name?”

“Oscar,” she replies tersely, not even looking up. Ezra wonders if she did whether the mask would hold. 

“Uncle Oscar,” he drawls out, “what does old Uncle Oscar do? He a Floater? Live somewhere planetside? You’d mentioned Kamrea at some point before if I’m not mistaken. Have you got a way to let him know you’re coming or were you plannin’ on showing up at his proverbial doorstep and appealin’ to his familial sensibilities?”

Finally, Cee’s eyes dart up to meet Ezra’s. 

“Are you done?”

“I s’pose.”

“Why do you even want to know?” she asks, somewhere just shy of snapping, “What does it matter?”

What did it matter? There was the obvious answer hanging in the air that neither of them wanted to acknowledge. That Ezra very much felt that he did not have the right to. And yet…

And yet she’d come back for him. She’d had every reason not to. He’d outlived his usefulness. He’d gotten her to the pod that she was more than capable of launching alone, they’d taken out the greatest threat among the mercenaries, and there he was: a wheezing, one-armed man, practically run-through. Karmic justice. At that moment, when Ezra sinks down against a tree, he’s got nothing left in him, but he’s upheld his end of the agreement, so to speak, and he hands Cee the gun and tells her to fly. 

And she comes back. 

Why? He still doesn’t have a satisfactory answer and is more afraid of asking her than nearly anything he’s ever encountered back in the Green.

He swallows hard, his throat dry. He’s probably running a fever, which he is in absolutely no mood for.

“Do I detect worry,” Cee says suddenly, clearly trying her best to imitate his accent but still utterly mangling it, “on behalf of my humble personage?” 

And she’s being a smartass, but there’s a small smile that’s snuck its way onto her face, hiding the truth of things, saying “don’t look too deep.” Kevva help them both, she’s already picking up his bad habits. Ezra can’t help but grin. 

“It’s fine,” she continues, back to her normal voice, “You did your part too. So you’re done with having to worry about me.” 

All Ezra wants right now is to just lie down and close his eyes for a bit, but he’s just so damn tired and there’s what feels like a very real fear that he’ll sleep the whole rest of the way, and when he finally wakes up they’ll have landed at the satellite hub and she’ll have disappeared forever. 

_C’mon now, get it together. This damn stubborn kid isn’t gonna ask for any help herself._

A follow-up thought, unbidden: 

_Now, doesn’t that sound familiar?_

“I’m asking and, fine, I’m worrying, because while I recognize that our partnership was perhaps not of the most conventional nature,” _yup, just slide right over that, just keep talking,_ “I hope that we’ve reached the point now that, if this is indeed where we part ways -”

_If??_

What “if”? Of course, they would. She was smart, a survivor, with her whole life ahead of her, why in Kevva’s name would she want to get stuck with him? He didn’t know a damn thing about kids and she wasn’t looking for another father. Sure as shit not one who would only serve as a constant reminder of what had been taken from her.

“- that I’m allowed to express concern for your, y’know, general well-being. Such as it were. I fucked things up for you, Cee. Even if it wasn’t personal. And I’ve tried to make it right and that goes beyond just getting you out of the Green. I just…”

He pauses, struggling to finish the thought, not because of the pain or the exhaustion or the dozen other things clambering for attention in his body right now but because for one in a meager handful of occurrences in his life, Ezra is having a hard time finding the words.

“...I just want to know...that you’re going to be okay. That you’re not running off to crawl up the innards of another bunch of Jata Bahlu for some unscrupulous breed of bastard taking advantage of a kid with no better options available to her.”

“I thought you were done,” Cee murmurs in response, knees hugged to her chest, notebook abandoned next to her. 

“I am now.”

“If there is no Uncle Oscar,” she says slowly, “what difference would it make? Things are what they are. You feeling shitty about me having nowhere to go doesn’t make somewhere appear. Anyway, I’m used to nowhere. It’s where I’m from.”

That practicality. No could’ve or should’ve. Just getting by. 

“I could give you my points -”

“That’s not gonna be enough to -”

“All of ‘em,” Ezra adds suddenly, aggressively, resolutely, surprising himself. Where did that come from? Still, even with the medical help, he probably wasn’t going to be much good to anyone afterward. _Help her_ , is the command currently beating inside his skull over and over. _She can do more with the points. She can do more than live a lousy half-life._

“You can take ‘em all, little bird. It’s not charity, so don’t even say it, understand? It’s recompense. It’s the even split that you never got. What am I gonna do with ‘em anyway?”

“Not die!” Cee shoots back, much more quickly and violently than he anticipated, “we had a deal! You literally just said it, an even split. That doesn’t mean money, _stupid_ , it means we both had to make it and if you fuck it up right at the end and die because you feel bad for me then what was all that even for? Why did I bother going back for you if you’re just gonna die out here instead of down there?!” 

And after this grand display of emotion, this slippage of her mask, Cee stalks away again back to the cockpit, as the ship left precious little room for proper storming off, letting fly one last “stupid!” as she does.

Ezra, meanwhile, feels his insides twist themselves into knots in a way that he knows has nothing to do with his injuries. 

So that was why she hadn’t left him.

Ezra’s right arm, which he cannot feel, which is rotting in a tent somewhere on the Green Moon, hurts him terribly. 

_Shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't imagine dragging these two idiots' inability to just, y'know, adopt each other out all that much longer, so this'll probably wrap next chapter. Immeasurable thanks to those commenting and leaving kudos, hope y'all are enjoying reading as much as I am writing.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rockhopper descends, Cee takes a leap, Ezra hears someone calling him, and I get downright abusive with the italics button.

Ezra would rather die than stay with her. 

That’s what he’s basically saying, right? 

And Cee had kind of figured that he’d wanted to be rid of her as soon as they’d reached the hub, she’d certainly made his life difficult enough already, taking one arm out of the picture, never mind trying to factor in caring for some Floater orphan following him around like a little hangdog. She’s trouble he doesn’t need.

Cee gazes out into the blackness, punctuated by the rusted over, patchwork metal of the line they’re docked in, crisscrossed out against the unending infinite. She huffs angrily, breathes hard out her nose. Doesn’t cry. She can feel her face getting hot and red and angry but she’s not going to cry.

Even so. 

It’s not like she’s _useless_. Surely she’d proved that over and over again during their mad dash to get off the moon and make the slingback. Ezra’d even said as much. She could pull her own weight, they could be partners, even. Maybe. 

Why does she want this so badly? She still can’t even call the man by his name.

Why does it hurt so much that this person who’s still practically a stranger (can someone still be a stranger after they’ve killed your father and you’ve cut off their arm and then helped them kill someone else who was trying to kill you both?) would rather make a big grand gesture of letting himself die, succumbing to wounds and pain she can’t even imagine than consider spending another minute longer with her than he needs to? 

If his conscience is suddenly so guilty, Cee muses, you’d think he’d be less of a coward about it. Stick around and _do_ something instead of trying to nobly collapse into a bleeding heap.

“Stupid,” she mutters.

All the adults in the Fringe, maybe everywhere, on every planet and floating in all the spaces in between. Wildly stupid. 

But Ezra is also the last person, anywhere, on or off-planet, who knows her. At all. There is something shivery and deeply discomfiting in the knowledge that once he’s gone, whatever the means, she will be completely, truly, objectively, alone. 

But that’s also his fault, isn’t it? Cee groans, rubbing her temples. It’s still all so tangled and confusing. Because honestly, it’s not like her father was all that much _there_ even when he was physically there, alive there. Between the drops, the pills, the capsules, whatever the chewable ones were, Damon always had at least one foot somewhere else anyway. That didn’t suddenly make his death _okay_ , it was just…

She’s known Ezra precious few cycles, and she’s not a baby, she’s not an idiot, she understands that he’s not...not _good_. She had said it herself, he was a killer. But she’d also shared more personal things with him in this short time than she had with her own father in who knows how long. Things had gotten that weird between her and Damon. That bad. 

Or maybe that means that Cee is bad. She chews her lower lip nervously at this new thought. Maybe she’s going to grow up and be the same kind of person Ezra is. She’s not sure if that’s true but perhaps it’s all the more reason to stay with him. 

Looming in the distance, seeming to appear whole cloth from the black, Cee is distracted from her spiraling, circular thoughts by a massive arm of the Central Satellite Hub. She’d been there before a few times with her father, and its size never failed to cause her breath to catch in her throat a bit. It was practically a minor planet unto itself. A moon all its own. 

Soon they would get the go-ahead on the comms from dispatch when it was their turn on the line to detach and descend into the hub’s artificial atmosphere and land the ship on one of its vast runways, where the promised medic would be waiting to treat Ezra. Then, presumably, they would part ways to find commercial transport to...somewhere. It was fine. She’d be fine.

She’d figure it out. And she’d do it before Ezra had the opportunity to do anything stupid.

Cee sits alone in the cockpit for a few hours, watching their destination grow larger and larger, too tired for music but too awake to try and rest. So she sits in silence, the only sounds the everpresent hum of the rockhopper, chugging along as best as it can, and intermittent coughing from Ezra, back in the crew’s quarters, where Cee assumes he’s fallen asleep, hopes he’s managed to fall asleep, is growing increasingly concerned that if he has fallen asleep, whether or not he’ll be able to wake back up again.

She tries not to look too relieved when, as the comms begin squawking at her, Ezra stumbles into the cockpit, as if on cue. His hair is tousled all over the place, the off-color patch of blonde-white sticking almost straight up off his head as he blinks owlishly at Cee. He looks worryingly gray and not particularly rested, but still very much alive. He turns his gaze towards the Central Hub.

“Well, now if that isn’t a sight for the weak and weary.”

“Craft 2742, do you copy?” the comms crackle with the disembodied voices of the freighter hub. 

Cee quickly punches the intercom button, “This is 2742, we copy.”

“2742, you are cleared for drop to Runway 8-ONLC.”

“Copy that,” Cee responds with a confidence that maybe doesn’t reach the rest of her but certainly sounds like she’s been piloting drop pods all her life.

But Ezra isn’t on the other end of a static-y communications array and is privy to the body language of the girl in front of him who’s practically curled into a ball in the pilot’s chair. 

“Hey,” he says, not ungently, snapping her out of it. Cee looks up to see a lopsided grin spreading across his face, “you ready to land this tub, Birdie?”

“I’ve never done it before,” Cee answers, hating how nervous she sounds, how close to a whine it feels like to her, “at least, not by myself. My father usually did most of it,” she winces as she says so and Ezra assumes it’s due to the still-sensitive nature of the subject, but in truth, Cee’s just remembering the final time Damon landed a pod, how he’d been high, burned their gel, gotten them stranded in the Green in the first place.

“Well, I can’t do it by myself either,” Ezra says, waving his arm for emphasis. But his tone isn’t accusatory, if anything it’s encouraging, conspiratorial. Maybe it’s because they’re so near the end, but he almost looks excited, “so you get one hand, so to speak, I get the other, and between the two of us, I imagine a fairly skilled pilot will emerge.”

Cee snorts, despite herself, despite their previous fight, despite literally everything. _Equal partners_ , she thinks, not without humor. She recalls one of their early conversations where Ezra had bemoaned her father’s habit of only telling her what he thought she needed to know about a job, had stressed the importance of an equal partnership.

Both Ezra and her father trusted her to help - _Clean the filter on the thrower, Cee. I need you to man the map, see if you can figure out how far off-course we went. Stay hidden, keep your mic muted, and wait for my signal._ \- but her father had placed all that trust in her because he so often couldn’t trust himself, because of the drops or the capsules or whatever else he could find to drown out what was haunting the inside of his head. Cee had never learned what - now never will - because it had been just another thing Damon thought she didn’t need to know about. 

Ezra just seems to trust her because he trusts her. The lack of baggage, in at least this one area...it’s nice. 

And they prepare to descend onto the runway, starting to push buttons, tilt thrusters, and nudge controls as Cee skims the flight manual. The rockhopper, however, stripped to the bone by the mercenaries, having managed to carry them towards their destination in a mostly agreeable fashion thus far, now has other plans.

It starts well enough: they detach, begin to drift downward, assimilate the runway coordinates sent to them by the freighter line dispatch into their ship’s navigation, and Ezra pulls up the viewscreen. 

It’s when they fully activate the thrusters and actually push down towards the artificial gravity and atmosphere that things begin to go to shit. The tiny ship starts rattling, first a little, then a lot, as the navigation console suddenly comes alive with lights flashing warning signs, beeps alerting them that things are not as they should be, as though the creaking, shuddering movements of the rockhopper as it tries to tug itself away from Cee and Ezra aren’t indication enough.

“What’s wrong with it? What’s happening?” Cee asks, trying to wrest back control. She feels her pulse quickening, her body starting to shake in its own rhythm separate from the ship. She mostly asks just to ask. It’s fairly obvious what’s happening but it feels like the crash landing on the Green Moon all over again and she’s trying so hard not to be scared.

“Ship’s fallin’ apart,” Ezra grunts in response, a panel literally popping off the sidewall as he does, as if eager to prove his point, “Kevva knows what those idiots must’ve torn out.” The three arms between them struggle to keep the ship on-course while Ezra stays glued to the viewscreen. 

“Try to keep the nose pointed where it is,” Ezra instructs without looking towards her. The ship bucks and buckles like it’s trying to heave them off and Ezra has to let go, has to brace himself with his only hand to keep from falling right out of the pilot’s chair, gasping in pain as the seatbelt snaps against his injured abdomen. He closes his eyes for a moment, takes a beat, unfastens the safety harness, and then is back at the viewscreen.

“We’re almost there!”

The ship groans like a living being, like a creature in the throes of some great agony, more pieces of it breaking off as alarms start to wail inside the cockpit, the two forced to ignore them, they’re so close now, and Cee can’t help but think that that’s all they’ve been for so many cycles now, so close, the true finish line somehow always just out of reach. 

There’s a particularly grating metallic keen overhead and Cee looks up to see a sizable panel of metal sheeting that’s come loose and is hanging precariously above Ezra’s head. The cockpit shudders but she manages to hold on to the thrusters.

“Just try to keep it steady, Cee, you’re doing great!” Ezra yells, straining to be heard over the sounds of the ship trying to shake itself to pieces. He doesn’t look away from the viewscreen as he says it, fully focused on the task of trying to keep them centered. 

Cee meanwhile, glances back up at the loose panel. She thinks of Ezra’s former partner, hulking and broad. If that thing fell on him it would easily lay him out flat. If it falls on Ezra right now, weak as he is, Cee knows with a certainty that unsettles her that it’ll kill him. But she can’t let go of the thrusters, she has to keep them on course, they’re _so close_.

“Hey,” she tries, but is drowned out by the noise.

_“Hey!”_

_**“Ezra!”** _

The shock of hearing his own name spoken aloud actually causes the man to jerk his head away from the viewscreen but there’s a loud _snap_ above their heads and she doesn’t even think, she moves so fast she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it, really. In one fluid motion, she abandons the thrusters and throws herself upward and to the side, slapping the release button on the co-pilot’s harness as she does and tackling Ezra to the ground as the massive hunk of metal crashes down to fill the space he’d occupied just moments before.

Cee, however, is not quite fast enough to clear it completely. 

A falling edge clips the side of her head and sends her sprawling away from Ezra as the ship enters a tailspin.

“Cee!” 

The girl’s name seems to physically tear itself out of Ezra’s throat. He slides across the ground to her, gripped by a fear he’s never felt before.

“No, no, no, no, no!”

Cee’s lying still, horribly still, a fair amount of blood coming down the side of her head. But that could mean anything, could be a gaping wound, could be a little nick, he knows from experience that head wounds bleed like a sonuvabitch, the off-color patch of hair on his head was a souvenir that went along with that particular bit of knowledge.

As he cradles Cee in his arm, tries to gently pull her up into a sitting position as the warning lights flash red and alarms blare, his heart hammering, she groans slightly and Ezra feels just the smallest bit of relief.

“C’mon, talk to me, girl. Stay with me, Cee.”

But she just garbles out something unintelligible and Ezra grimaces and tries to check her head as gingerly as possible. It’s not bad. It’s a cut. It’s survivable. Provided he can land this ship with one fucking arm. 

Something slots into place in his mind. A realization. Ezra is not a good person (this isn’t the realization, just a simple statement of fact), but he’s not a monster, not a needlessly cruel, animalistic thing. He’s greedy, manipulative, certainly not above throwing his weight around to get what he wants. All these traits had been magnified in the Green, his sense of self-preservation warped into cold selfishness. He’d forgotten what it felt like to care about other people because caring about other people was a liability. Or at least that’s what he’d convinced himself to feel better about the things he’d done. 

And so he had let all his feelings about this peculiar, brave, wildly clever kid linger and fester on guilt until he had made himself certain that was all they were. He owed her for what he took from her, that was all. He had to get her to safety, wanted to make sure, even after they’d reached the agreed-upon goal, that she’d be alright, had told himself he was willing to up and die, all because he just felt so damn guilty.

Turns out that was bullshit.

As he struggles to secure a half-conscious Cee back in the co-pilot’s chair, Ezra is forced to admit that at some point during this venture, somewhere in the Green, he had begun to care quite a bit about this girl.

He’s not a good person but he’s not a monster. He would’ve felt bad for any kid whose parent saw fit to bring them somewhere like the Green, and nonetheless felt worse still for taking that parent away from them. But this isn’t about any random Floater kid. This is about Cee, specifically, and everything about her that he liked and wanted to protect and if she’d gotten herself grievously injured or - Kevva help him - if she died now because she’d protected _him_ \- 

“Nope,” he says it aloud as if that makes it more possible, more real, something he has more control over. He can see the runway now, outside the viewscreen, they’re careening down it, and he’s trying everything to slow them down but Ezra knows in the pit of his stomach that the second the ship touches the tarmac it’s going to _bounce_.

“Where’s the parachute release? Ah -” he presses a button and a deeply troubling Nothing happens, “The _parachute_?! How much weight does that even lose? Between you and me, Birdie, I think at some point they just started hacking things off this ship for fun.”

Cee mumbles something that’s not quite words back at him.

“Your valuable input has been noted.”

If he wasn’t so scared out of his mind, Ezra would’ve found a humorous symmetry in the situation: he had, after all, spent the launch in much the same fashion that Cee was enduring the descent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so...one more chapter, actually. But then we are done. For real this time.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will this deeply maladjusted spaceman and spacekid realize their inherent self-worth and seize the opportunity to build a broken little family together? Or will the Universe get tired of them taking forever to get over their trauma and internalized space-bullshit and just Murder Them instead? Find Out in the Thrilling Conclusion That Got Really Long Oh Jeez.

Cee’s mind is unmoored, adrift through memories that swirl together in her head in a confusing tumult of colors, sound, and feeling. 

⸻

_“You didn’t tell me that we could be stranded,” Cee frowns, looking up at her father’s skinny frame, currently hunched over the crank to charge the thrower._

_“We won’t,” he insists, far too casually. “We have three cycles for the job before we have to catch the slingback...plenty of time.”_

_⸻_

_A man in a weathered enviro-suit stands with his boot on her father’s chest, a disarming grin on his face. His massive, silent partner breathes heavily behind him, hefting an equally huge thrower. The smiling man asks for the starter to their pod as friendly as you like, his words laced with venom._

_“If I give you the key,” Damon grunts painfully, “you’re just gonna kill me.”_

_“That is not necessarily true,” the man called Ezra replies, sounding almost wounded, “Nevertheless, contained within the act of killing is a broad spectrum of technique.”_

_He allows for a brief, pointed pause before adding, “so there is still incentive for you to acquiesce if that’s what you’re getting at.”_

_From her hiding place behind a tree, Cee shivers._

_⸻_

_The man, Ezra, hands high above his head, stares at Cee, his head cocked slightly to the side, an expression of pure surprise flitting across his face before being replaced with the previous mask of detached amusement._

_“Now this is somethin’ I have never seen in all my time in the Green...A little girl.”_

_⸻_

_“Dad, can we go?”_

_Damon acts like he can’t hear Cee, his eyes on Ezra’s container of aurelac. He looks hungry and angry and another emotion Cee isn’t quite sure how to parse but it frightens her all the same._

_“Your girl is scared. You should listen to her,” Ezra advises, as if with two guns drawn on him he’s in a position to be giving such warnings. As much as the situation has turned against the man, there is still a part of him that seems vaguely bemused by the whole affair, by the idea of this man who’s brought his daughter with him to prospect for a band of mercenaries on a toxic moon._

_“No harm done yet.”_

_⸻_

_Even with his face clouded by pain as he clutches his arm, Ezra still regards Cee with mild interest as she aims his thrower back at him, which is not the emotion she’d prefer to be evoking. Her hands are shaking, not from fear, she’s not scared, from her father’s drugs she’d choked down earlier like an idiot._

_“You gonna shoot?” Ezra drawls, honestly curious._

_“You killed my father,” she says, swallowing hard because that feels like what you’re supposed to say before you shoot someone, before you take revenge on them._

_“That is..._ technically _true.”_

_What’s that going to get her, though? Damon will still be dead. She’ll still be stuck in a broken-down pod only now it’ll have a corpse in it. But what else is there? As long as Ezra is sitting here with her, injured or not, he’s a threat. Right?_

_“Kevva waits, girl! Shoot or help! Just make a move.”_

_⸻_

_“You’re trying to trick me,” Cee frowns, readjusts her hands on the gun._

_“Let me help you. I can harvest. I can offer protection.”_

_She shakes her head, “You’re a killer.”_

_“I am, indeed,” Ezra admits easily, “but are you?”_

_“It was all in the name of self-preservation, Birdie, it was nothing personal.”_

_“Shut-up,” she mutters, uninterested in any “that’s just the way things are” bullshit like she hasn’t grown up seeing every shade of it already, feels her insides arching backward in disgust at this new nickname she’s been given._

_“I’m your safest route home,”_

_What’s worst of all is that he’s making sense._

_“Shut-up!”_

_“And in the end, we’ll both be rich.”_

_No. What’s worst of all is that after everything, not only does she still need to catch the slingback, she also needs the money. Her eyes narrow._

_“....Even split.”_

_“Of course.”_

⸻

When the rockhopper finally lands on the tarmac, well, calling it a _landing_ is generous, but it’s still a step above crashing. Sweat is pouring off Ezra at the navigational controls and frankly, he’s shocked he hasn’t had a heart attack on top of literally everything else that’s happened to him. Not that he wants to put that out into the universe, he just wouldn’t be surprised at this point, is all.

When he sees the final moment coming, all that’s left is to brace for impact and hope for the best. Next to him, Cee is strapped in tight, she’s been in and out of consciousness, muttering things to herself and he can’t really hear her over the noise of the alarms and the sound of the ship trying to turn itself inside out but when he checked her harness one last time he caught something along the lines of, “Dad...we need to go.”

Luckily, he was too busy trying to get himself buckled into the partially-shredded pilot’s chair, after managing to shove the fallen panel most of the way off of it, for his mind to linger on that for too long.

The landing is...well, it’s a step above crashing. But they get through it. Ezra can smell smoke, which is never a particularly good sign, but nothing seems to be on fire. Yet.

“Well,” he exhales, pausing to make way for a cough that shakes his whole frame, “that wasn’t such a terrible chore now, was it?”

He looks over at Cee for confirmation, but her eyes are closed and her head’s hanging down and he feels his heart start racing again.

Ezra tries to undo his seatbelt, his hand refusing to cooperate on the first few attempts. He’s seeing spots and tries to blink them away, shaking his head. He finally makes it up, staggers over to Cee, can at least tell pretty quickly that she’s still breathing. 

“Cee,” he says, shaking her shoulder, hopeful in the desperate sort of way he’s been finding himself lately, “you’re gonna have to work with me here. I fear I may have reached the limits on what my adrenaline is able to provide.”

Cee groans and stirs a bit but stubbornly refuses to do more than that. Ezra now notices that he can do more than just smell smoke, he can see it, filling up the cockpit and presumably the rest of the ship as well. They’re running out of time.

“C’mon Cee,” Ezra has to stop to cough again, clutches the headrest to keep himself upright, “did you not say something about a medic waitin’ outside? With the stir our arrival caused, we probably got half the satellite -” 

He has to stop for another break, which is incredibly frustrating, he’s got no patience for interruptions, “- out there to see what the commotion is. We just need to get out. It’s what, fifty steps? That’s nothing. That’s, that’s…” Ezra struggles to conjure something comparable, “That’s all we got left to go.”

Miraculously, Cee cracks open her eyes, can’t seem to manage to get them all the way open, still doesn’t look like she’s completely aware of where she is but at this point, Ezra will take whatever he can get and slowly, so slowly, like she’s wading through wet sand, she lurches to her feet and the two, leaning on the walls of the ship, each other, whatever steady thing presents itself, take their fifty steps.

The entire rockhopper is clouded in thick smoke and Ezra’s eyes are stinging to the point where he can’t make out whatever’s on fire but he can feel the heat of it, and he slams his fist into the hatch-release button against the wall, and yes, of course, obviously, it’s jammed. Why wouldn’t it be? Why would _anything_ be working the way it was supposed to right now?

Had they seriously come this far to burn up in this piece of shit ship? The sheer, overwhelming injustice of it is enough to make him want to scream but instead, he just hits the button several more times for good measure, feels himself struggling to stay standing with Cee leaning most of her weight against him. Finally, the hatch door cracks open, starts to slide its way upward, smoke leaking out as it does. But something is definitely still wrong with it, it’s moving far too slowly, and Ezra shifts back and forth, antsy. 

He hears rumbling from deep within the innards of the rockhopper, and it sounds like thunder. The hatch has risen enough so there’s room for a person to slide underneath, if they squeezed, or were particularly small, and he decides maybe he’s got a bit more adrenaline left than he’d thought.

Cee is hardly within her senses when she feels a vibration go through the ship, when Ezra roughly takes her by the shoulder and sends her spinning groundwards and she hears, “Tuck and roll, girl!” sending her through the hatch door before he drops to the ground himself to follow.

She tumbles across the threshold and suddenly, magically, is in the open air of the artificial atmosphere, rolling across the rough ground of the tarmac until she’s quickly picked up by a strong pair of arms that start to tug her away as several voices shout things she can’t pick out over her head until one phrase manages to break free.

“Duck and cover!”

And for whatever reason, it’s this one that makes Cee pull away from the arms holding her up, wrench herself back towards the rockhopper, stumbling, crying out. 

“Ezra!”

And through vision blurred by smoke and dried blood and the immediate effects of at this point several nasty hits to the head, she can see a figure try to dive through the hatch, but then she’s knocked back to the ground by an explosion, the ship’s fuel cells finally calling it quits as they meet the satellite’s artificial atmosphere, and everything goes dark. 

⸻

_“Were you going to give me to them?”_

_The question hangs in the air longer than Cee would like. She can’t tell if Ezra is mulling over the appropriate response, debating whether to tell the truth or just struggling to talk around the pain in his arm. Probably a combination._

_“....No.”_

_⸻_

_“When I lost the book, he said that it was for the best. He said that it was a distraction rereading the same book and that I needed to focus,” Cee can’t stop herself from hitting the word “focus” with disdain, her feelings still raw from that fight, from losing a book that felt like a friend._

_“Focus on what?” There’s a wry edge to Ezra’s voice as he asks._

_“Cultivating skills relevant to my field,” Cee replies, eyes rolling, her voice heavy with sarcasm._

_But as soon as the words have left her she regrets them. She hangs her head down and feels ashamed. Damon hasn’t even been dead a full cycle and here she is talking shit about him with one of his killers._

_“Maybe he was right,” she says, the grin she’d gotten from talking about_ The Streamer Girl _falling off her face just as quickly as it had appeared, “Maybe if I had then he wouldn’t be dead.”_

_Ezra’s mouth opens and closes a few times, before he manages to choke out, “Well, you can’t...you can’t think like that…”_

_Up until this point Cee’s seen Ezra be several things: cynically amused, bluntly practical, frightened, scheming, and perhaps even genuinely sincere. Possibly. Some emotions are much easier to discern as genuine than others, like the fear of having your arm amputated by a strange child._

_But as he awkwardly hunches up his shoulders, he looks to Cee as though he’s honestly trying to find the right words to comfort her, and not just give the impression of doing so._

_“You go down that path it’s...it’s not good. If you need someone to blame, you blame me.”_

_⸻_

_The mercenary Inumon is dead on the ground, stabbed over and over by the tiny, vibrating excavator tool. Ezra leans against a tree, wheezing painfully as Cee recouples. He grabs her arm, his eyes jagged and blurred but managing to focus on her. She thinks about his boot on her father’s chest._

_“You need to go. You grab the gun and you go. You can make it. **Get out of here!** ”_

_He presses the thrower he used to end what little remained of her father’s life into her hands. She sees the rockhopper sitting, waiting outside the treeline. She glances back at Ezra, who, less than three cycles ago, was ready to do whatever it took to get out of the Green, seemed plenty square with killing a stranger if it meant he could get their ship. Now, he’s given up everything so that a different stranger can make it out instead._

_She thinks that contained within the act of dying is a broad spectrum of technique._

_She runs._

⸻

When Cee wakes up, she goes through several phases of confusion. First, she thinks she’s back at Puggart Bench with her father, and that if she doesn’t hurry up they’re going to be late heading out to some new job. She starts to sit up and is immediately overwhelmed by dizziness and pain. She tentatively reaches up a hand up to her head and realizes there’s a sizable bandage wrapped across it. 

Her next thought is that she still must be in the Green somewhere. What happened? She doesn’t remember an accident. Had Ezra patched her up? No, why would - it would be her father who - 

Cee closes her eyes, attempts to center herself, and then rolls over and throws up into a wastebasket that has been very conveniently placed at the side of the bed. 

She sees a pitcher of water and a stack of paper cups on a small table also next to the bed and slowly pours herself some, her arms shaking. She forces herself to drink slowly, even though it feels like she hasn’t had a drink in a thousand years. As she does this, she hears a door open, and a dark-haired young woman whose uniform and tablet mark her as a station medic comes into the room, looking entirely too cheerful for Cee’s comfort.

“Hey, there,” she says brightly, “my name’s Priya. I’m not _quite_ Dr. Priya yet, still doing the ol’ rounds before the final exams, y’know?”

Cee does not know and the two sit in an awkward pause before Not-Dr.-Priya continues, “but Dr. Joley’s off today - she’s saying gravity sickness but between you and me, it’s a hangover - and I’m the lead med tech under Dr. Joley, so you’re in good hands. I gotta say, it’s a good thing you requested a medic on standby for landing, although even then, none of us had ever seen anything quite like that, not even Leeds, and he was here for the Blip of Double-Five-Twelve, so _that’s_ saying something! We didn’t think anything living was coming out of that ‘hopper.”

“Of course, we’re glad we were wrong!” she quickly adds, “This is definitely a case where we’d all be much happier to be wrong than right.” 

Cee’s head hurts so much and she might have found the only person in the universe who talks more than Ezra.

Ezra. 

She frowns. Where was he? Where was she for that matter? Priya was saying so many things and it was so hard for Cee to follow it all. The rockhopper, a bad landing. She didn’t remember any of it. She remembered being on the Green Moon with - 

“All right, let’s make sure all of you is here on the station with us, yeah?”

Cee just nods, numb from shock and still unsure just what’s going on. 

“What’s your name?”

“Cee.”

“Where you from, Cee?”

“Nowhere,” Cee answers automatically, only thinking to explain when she sees the concerned look on the young medic’s face, “that’s not a concussion thing. I’m a Floater.”

Priya nods knowingly as if that answers other questions she hasn’t yet asked, scribbles something down. 

“The guys on the freighter line said you came from the Green Moon. That must’ve been, whew, _a lot_. Just judging from the state of the ship and you and your father’s injuries.”

Without warning, without consent from the rest of her, finally, Cee starts crying. 

“Woah, hey, it’s okay,” says Pryia, even though she’s backing away, “...something tells me I might be in over my head here. Uh, we’re just a glorified transport station really so I don’t have much I can offer you in the way of trauma counseling recommendation and I already gave you as much of the good painkillers as it’s probably safe for someone as small as you when we brought you in.”

“My father’s dead,” Cee says, more to herself than anyone else, not really listening to the medic.

“What?” Pryia frowns, shaking her head before breaking into a smile, “No, he’s fine! Well, okay, he’s not _fine_. Your dad’s in pretty bad shape but he’s a far cry from dead if that’s what you’re worried about. I suppose the confusion’s to be expected, you certainly wonked your noggin real good.”

Cee is still not one hundred percent sure she trusts where she is, and on top of that is trying very hard to balance seeing straight, sifting through the tumult of emotions and mixed-up memories in her head, along with the fact that this person just said the words “wonked your noggin” to her. And so it takes a moment for the full import of the rest of what she’d said to sink into Cee’s brain.

“My father? ...no, you don’t understand, I saw him -”

“I know,” Priya says, “and he’s lucky to be alive. No, luck doesn’t even do it justice, it’s practically a miracle.”

 _How?_

Cee knows, she _knows_ Damon died in the Green. Even if he’d somehow survived getting shot, even if he’d managed to get away unnoticed, how would he have made it off the moon, how would he have made the slingback before her? 

Why would he have left her behind?

She feels her stomach clench, feels like she’s filling up with ice. Had he seen her with Ezra and written her off? But then why tell this doctor that she’s his -

_**Ezra!** _

Cee’s hands tightly clutch the worn sheets of the medbay bed as she’s forced to close her eyes, too many images coming at her too fast.

The falling sheet of metal, the feeling of her body slamming into Ezra’s, the sharp pain of something striking her in the head, someone (Ezra, most likely) screaming, the tension of the harness strapped tight against her shoulders, the force of the landing, then smoke, heat, trouble breathing, the hatch, something about the hatch, tuck and roll and then - 

The rockhopper going up in flames and taking Ezra with it. 

Her brain had tried to mash it down, edit it out somehow. Lock it away, at least until she got her bearings and could properly process it all, but no luck. She’s about to start crying all over again when she tunes back in to Priya, who's been talking this entire time, oblivious to Cee. 

“- if he’d actually still _had_ the arm, that hatch would’ve slammed shut on it and either pinned him or torn it right off. Either way, he would’ve most likely bled out right there on the tarmac before we could even get to him. I know most prospectors wouldn’t be too keen on the idea of calling the effects of a dry breach a lucky break, but it saved your father’s life, that’s for sure.” 

“...my father.” Cee feels her heart stop and then start up again, only twice as fast.

Priya frowns again. She takes a small penlight out from her pocket, “let’s check your pupil dilation again, you’re starting to make me nervous.”

Cee shoves Priya’s arm out of the way. Or, she would shove it, if she had the strength. It’s really more of a limp push. “Can I see him?”

“I dunno, kid. He’s probably still asleep. There was quite a lot of work to do on him and we had to sedate - if you’ll pardon my language - the ever-loving shit out of him so he’d stop fighting long enough for us to do it. He kept yelling about how we needed to be helping _you_ ,” she pauses to huff indignantly, “and I’m like ‘sir, I get that this is a satellite but it’s still the Central Hub, not an outpost on some Fringe dirtball, we have enough medical staff to treat more than one person at the same time!’”

And Cee is definitely crying again, but it’s the softer kind now, punctuated by semi-hysterical, hiccupy giggles because it’s all too overwhelming but, yes, that’s definitely Ezra, even if she can’t yet confirm it with her own eyes. 

But she can so clearly picture the ship exploding in front of her, the shape of Ezra trying and failing to get away that this story still isn’t enough. It’s just words. So she tries again.

“Please? Even if he’s asleep. I just...I just need to see him.”

And Priya makes a pinched face like she’s weighing how much she wants to do it with how much trouble she thinks it could get her in. She finishes her mental calculations and nods.

“Let’s see how steady you are on your feet first, yeah?”

When Cee first stands up she thinks she might be sick again but she manages to keep it down and make herself look stable enough that Priya willingly escorts her to Ezra’s - her “father’s” - room in the medbay. She doesn’t like that. Even if it’s just an honest mistake, an assumption not a deception, it still feels like a betrayal. It feels like Damon’s ghost at her back. But there’s little point in trying to address it right now.

Inside his room, Ezra is, in fact, still asleep, and Priya leaves Cee alone in a slightly battered chair to sit and wait when she refuses to go back to her own room. When Priya had said he was in pretty bad shape, that had been a significant understatement. Cee had known how much of a mess he was when she’d lugged him to the rockhopper, but there was something about the way Ezra made himself big and loud and annoying that distracted from just how injured he was.

Now, when she sees him lying in the medbay bed, oxygen mask over his face, covered in cuts in bruises that Cee knew she had her fair share of as well, along with a fresh, professional bandage wrapped around where his right shoulder ends and his arm should begin, lying still and silent, he almost doesn’t look like Ezra at all. But he’s there and he’s real and he’s _alive_ and they’ve finally made it past “so close” to just “made it.”

When Cee came back for Ezra so that they could escape the Green together, when she’d tore the ship apart looking for a field kit to hold him together until they reached the Central Satellite Hub, when she’d saved him from getting crushed by the falling panel, she thought she’d understood why. That it was what she’d been saying all along: It was part of the deal, a decision she’d made that they both deserved to get out alive. If there were no spoils to be split evenly, then there was at least the prospect of escape, and they’d both get their share. 

But it was more than that, wasn’t it? 

She thinks back to the realization she had before, about how Ezra is the last person left who knows her, but really thinks about it now. That it’s not just that he is aware of her existence but that he knows her and he _likes_ her and at some point, she started liking him too, which was wrong, which was terrible, because someone who took her father from her shouldn’t have been _likable_. But of course, it’s not that simple, and she likes that she can talk more around Ezra, that he doesn’t just shut her down and she likes how strangely easy it is for him to trust her. Something shifted, over the course of their journey, and he had gone from feeling like a threat that had to be constantly watched to feeling safe, and like someone who needed to be kept safe themselves.

Cee wants to keep knowing Ezra. She doesn’t care about points or even splits or whatever, but she wonders when he wakes up if he’ll go back to his original plan of dumping his points on her to make up for what happened to Damon and then parting ways. As she thinks this, there’s a rustle of movement in front of her and she looks up from her thoughts to see Ezra blinking blearily into wakefulness.

Ezra doesn’t remember anything after the explosion, but that’s to be expected. Trauma and all. Part of him is surprised to be waking up at all. Perhaps an even larger part of him is surprised to find Cee there when he does. Not that he knows where else she would’ve gone, and he’s just thanking Kevva the knock to the head looks to be the worst of what happened to her. 

“Hey there, Birdie,” he croaks, his voice thick with rust, “been a tick. You look like shit.”

Cee snorts, “You should look in a mirror. The med tech said you’re lucky, you know.”

Every nerve ending in his body hurts along with several others that aren’t in his body anymore. 

“Forgive me if I don’t feel touched by the grace of Lady Luck,” he replies with a grimace.

But then Cee tells him what Priya had said about the hatch slamming back down when the fuel cells had exploded, and how if he’d still had his right arm it would’ve snapped shut on it and likely been the death of him. And Ezra laughs harder than he can ever remember laughing in his life. He laughs so hard he cries and he doesn’t even care. 

“Some folks out on the Fringe,” he starts, once he’s finally calmed himself down enough to talk, “they take to religion for comfort y’know? Always spoutin’ this and that about divine plans and ‘everything happening for a reason.’” Ezra shakes his head and a few more loose chuckles fall out, “I dare say I find myself tempted to take up the faith. If anyone who knew me was left around they’d be extremely amused at the idea.”

Ezra stops on that thought, stares at it for a while as he and Cee sit in silence. “You know something funny?” he finally says, “Since the untimely demise of my former partner, you are the only person, in the entire universe, who knows me.”

This revelation seems to shake something loose in Cee. Her face tightens, and she fidgets with the hem of her shirt.

“I don’t think it’s that funny, Ezra,” she mutters, and Ezra still is unused to hearing her use his name, wonders what changed, “You’re...you’re the only person who knows me now too. And I thought you died. And that was after everything I did to try and get us both here alive. You keep taking stupid risks.”

Ezra pushes himself up into a sitting position, aggravated, yanks the oxygen mask off, probably ill-advised, based on the noises the machines he’s hooked up to start making, but it’s in the way. 

“You know I could very well say the same thing about you. I know it’s been some time, but you may recall that I damn near got myself gutted trying to get _you_ on that ship. And how do you repay me? By almost cleaving your head in half trying to save an old bastard who was half-dead already. You could’ve thrown away all my good work.”

“I didn’t think about it, Ezra,” Cee protested, “I just saw that it was going to fall and -”

“That’s what fam -” Ezra chokes on the word. No. Absolutely not. The combination of recent near-death-experiences, painkillers, and the fact that Cee is suddenly okay with saying his name is a potent one that almost makes him entirely too bold. He makes a show of coughing and quickly amends himself.

“That’s what friends do, they save each other. That’s your even split.”

Neither is quite sure what to say next when Priya re-enters, presumably called by the upset beeping of the monitors Ezra’s currently attached to. 

“Well, you’re certainly looking lively!” she chirps, “but we should probably be lying back down and we should definitely be putting _this_ -” she easily pushes Ezra back down against the pillow and aggressively readjusts the oxygen mask, “ - back on. Excellent. So, you’ve definitely still got some recovering to do,” she said looking down at her tablet, “but I’m sure eventually you’ll want to be thinking about a prosthetic. We can provide you with a working model but, personally, I’d recommend you wait and go somewhere planetside for that procedure.”

“I don’t know if I have the points for that anyway,” Ezra replies, waving it off.

“I can help,” Cee says quickly.

“That wasn’t part of the deal,” Ezra says sharply.

If Priya finds this a strange conversation between father and daughter, she doesn’t say anything, but Cee stops talking and waits until Priya has left the room before picking up the argument.

“Look around, Ezra,” she says, “in case you haven’t noticed, the deal’s over. We did it. We both made it out alive, as agreed. So this,” and she pauses and gestures to where Ezra’s arm is not, “is something else. A new deal. We stick together. Keep helping each other. That’s what friends do, right?”

Ezra looks away from Cee, “I can’t make up what I’ve taken away from you, Cee. You gotta figure out your next move and you deserve it to be more than bumming around with a one-armed -”

“Ezra,” she interrupts, “shut-up. This is a good deal. You should take it.”

And Ezra is tired, has worn himself out just with the talking he’s done already. He’s arguing for the sake of arguing because he feels like he ought to, because it doesn’t feel right that he gets something that he wants after everything he’s done, but he doesn’t have the energy to match Cee’s stubbornness, so he just has to promise himself that he’ll do everything in his power to protect her instead.

“Fine, deal. Signed and sealed, little bird.”

And for now, there’s nothing left to do but rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that took longer than I thought. Had work and then this just kept getting fuckin longer and LONGER but thank you so much for your lovely comments and glad y'all enjoyed it, I enjoyed the shit out of writing it and I haven't enjoyed writing anything in a while so that's a Big Deal for me. They're just real good characters.


End file.
